January 2011
24 posts
How Do You Decaffeinate Coffee?
It’s pretty simple. To make decaf, you start out with regular coffee beans and then take out the caffeine. Manufacturers usually begin the process by steaming fresh beans until they’re moist and swollen. Next, the caffeine is extracted using a solvent, such as water, ethyl acetate, methylene chloride, or highly pressurized carbon dioxide. Then the beans are steamed and dried again, which removes...
The Greatest Orson Welles Quote About Transformers...
“I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.”
A Few Successful Things Focus Groups Hated
First National City Bank (now Citibank) tested an early version of the ATM in the 1960s. According to a write-up of the experiment, “It seems the only people using the machines were a small number of prostitutes and gamblers who didn’t want to deal with tellers face to face.” Two of television’s most popular shows weren’t exactly met with enthusiasm. Focus groups...
Edgar Allan Poe: The Original Balloon Boy
Edgar Allan Poe was born 202 years ago today. To celebrate, here’s a Poe story you might not have heard before.
You probably remember 2009’s infamous “Balloon Boy” hoax. Turns out the Heene family that perpetrated that fraud weren’t even being entirely original in their attention grabbing. They were actually cribbing from Poe. In 1844 Poe cooked up a similar aviation hoax in the...
A Boy Named Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnpr-...
Enacted in 1982, the Naming law in Sweden was originally created to prevent non-noble families from giving their children noble names, but a few changes to the law have been made since then. The part of the law referencing first names reads: “First names shall not be approved if they can cause offense or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it, or names which for some obvious...
Ben Franklin’s 200+ Synonyms for “Drunk”
Ben Franklin turned 305 today! To celebrate, here’s a list of expressions meaning “inebriated” that Franklin first published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on January 6, 1737.
The Drinkers Dictionary
A He is Addled, He’s casting up his Accounts, He’s Afflicted, He’s in his Airs. B He’s Biggy, Bewitch’d, Block and Block, Boozy, Bowz’d, Been at Barbadoes, Piss’d in the Brook, ...
Irene Morgan v. The Commonwealth of Virginia
Eleven years before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white passenger, Irene Morgan did the same on a Greyhound bus bound from Virginia to Maryland.
It was a hot and humid July morning in 1944, and Morgan had been visiting her mother in Gloucester, Virginia. She was probably feeling the effects of the oppressive heat more than many...
Two Space or Not Two Space
We’ve been told Pluto is not a planet, the Zodiac is (more…) bogus, there’s no Brontosaurus and now … no two commas after periods? I don’t know what to believe! But Slate’s (rather forceful) piece on never putting two spaces after the period has flown in the face of all of my schooling. Am I a lone relic of bygone typing methods?
As much as I know you guys like debating grammar rules,...
The Roles They Turned Down: Sean Connery as...
Sean Connery, who said he’d never read the J.R.R. Tolkien series and claimed he “didn’t understand the script,” turned down the role of Gandalf. New Line Cinema offered the Scottish actor up to 15 percent of worldwide box office receipts, which would have earned Connery more than any actor had ever been paid for a single role—as much as $400 million.
[by Ransom Riggs]
Conversation Fodder for the Occasional Gambler
The sum of all the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666.
Gamers Make Better Surgeons
The next time you go under the knife, make sure to vet your surgeon’s video game skills first. In 2007, researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City reported that people who played video games for at least three hours a week made better surgeons. In a series of hands-on tests that mimicked laparoscopic surgery, gamers made 37 percent fewer errors and were 27 percent faster...
The Forgotten History of American History X
Before director Tony Kaye embarked on his first feature film, 1997’s American History X, he’d already been declared a genius of the advertising world. Kaye was famous for taking months to craft the perfect 30-second commercial, and his meticulousness only bolstered his reputation. Top brands including Guinness and Volvo sought out his services, because he was just that good. But Kaye was...
The Real World: Mental Hospital Edition
This is the true story of three schizophrenics, who all believed they were Jesus Christ. It wasn’t long before they stopped being polite and started getting real crazy. In 1959, social psychologist Milton Rokeach wanted to test the strength of self-delusion. So, he gathered three patients, all of whom identified themselves as Jesus Christ, and made them live together in the same mental...
The Story That Will Never Be an e-Book
Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright
Some might call Gadsby a “love” story. But Ernest Vincent Wright wouldn’t have used that word. Instead, he described his novel as a story of “strong liking” and “throbbing palpitation.” That’s because in 1939, Wright gave himself one restriction: He promised to write Gadsby without using the letter E. Wright wanted to prove that a great author could work...
Dr. Who? The Medical Background of Popular...
Dr. Brown’s A staple of any good Jewish deli, the famous soda line started in 1869 with Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic (otherwise known as Cel-Ray Tonic), a seltzer fortified with sugar and celery seed extract. Early in the 20th century, other sodas weren’t yet kosher, earning Doc Brown’s line a permanent niche in places that served knishes. Dr. Scholl’s William Mathias Scholl was still a medical...
The First Stewardess
The term seems hopelessly outdated today, but until the early 1980s, the majority of airline cabin attendants were female and it was commonplace to refer to them as “stewardesses.” In the late 1920s, a registered nurse named Ellen Church was so captivated with air travel that she took flying lessons. She approached the president of Boeing Air Transport (BAT) for a pilot position and was...
WatchOn Monday on mentalfloss.com, I posted a clip of my two-year-old playing with her U.S. Presidents placemat alongside our “can you guess the president by his placemat portrait?” quiz. Gawker re-posted the video last night, and by this morning — and this is a sentence I hope I never type again — my daughter’s video had gone viral. Today it showed up on the Yahoo! homepage and NBC...
December 2010
19 posts
Who Was Dom Perignon?
Contrary to popular misconception, the namesake of the famous brand didn’t invent champagne. But Perignon, a Benedictine monk who worked as cellar master at an abbey near Epernay during the 17th and 18th centuries, did have quite an impact on the champagne industry.
In Perignon’s day, sparkling wine wasn’t really a sought-after beverage. In fact, the bubbles were considered...
